Don’t let the latest stats fool you.  When CIHI reports that there were 64, 641 abortions in 2010, (a 40% drop in numbers since 2004) you know that something is up. Sure enough, we see that Quebec no longer reports abortions at all (hospital or clinic), BC has “incomplete” data, meaning that the majority of clinic abortions have not been reported, and Manitoba and New Brunswick have “unreported” clinic abortions.  How’s that for shoddy statistics?  I don’t suspect that any other surgical procedure in Canada would be so poorly reported.

When Quebec last reported in 2008, they had 27, 319 abortions.

If the numbers aren’t being reported, what does that mean for medical billing?  At the very least, taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent.

This is an issue that needs to be seriously addressed – we need a public outcry that will get politicians moving.  Really, if abortion is such a great, liberating thing, what are they trying to hide?

I’ve decided to pick up the slack (feeling a little guilty) and this certainly caught my eye.  The great investigative journalism of blogger Pat Maloney brings us the numbers of signatures on the latest petitions asking for protection for unborn Canadians, but more interestingly, who is presenting them in the House of Commons. It’s nice to see democracy at work, and like Pat, I think we need to keep it up!  The more, the merrier.

There are on-line petitions garnering support, but the more effective petition is the officially approved, old-style paper one that everyone signs and then you send it in to your MP.  That can be found here.

I know we live in Canada, BUT there are just a few interesting things that are going on south of the 49th parallel right now that are worth mentioning. Like President Obama’s video from the White House fully endorsing Planned Parenthood:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naP2FbO8_-c&feature=youtu.be”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naP2FbO8_-c&feature=youtu.be]

“So when some professional politicians casually say that they’ll get rid of Planned Parenthood, don’t forget what they’re really talking about: eliminating the funding for preventive care that millions of women rely on and leaving them to fend for themselves. That’s why last year when Republicans in Congress threatened to shut down the government unless we stopped funding Planned Parenthood, I had a simple answer: no.”

Aside from the glaring fact that one in five of Planned Parenthood’s affiliates is under investigation for fraudulent billing practices and for ignoring statutory rape and human trafficing laws in order to push teens through for abortions, he talks about Planned Parenthood as if it offers preventative health measures like mammograms, when we well know that they are really primarily doing abortions. As Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, points out, “Somehow the White House has missed the memo that Planned Parenthood doesn’t provide mammograms. How could they have missed that?”  That’s playing politics with women’s lives.

The other interesting thing that is worth mentioning is former Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s call for Democrats to tone down the abortion rehtoric.

“I never have believed that Jesus Christ would approve of abortions… I’ve signed a public letter calling for the Democratic Party at the next convention to espouse my position on abortion which is to minimize the need, requirement for abortion and limit it only to women whose life are in danger or who are pregnant as a result of rape or incest. I think if the Democratic Party would adopt that policy that would be acceptable to a lot of people who are now estranged from our party because of the abortion issue.”

Carter’s timing couldn’t have been better!

Tinkering with the origins of human life leaves many of us feeling uncertain, at best.  Should we really be creating human embryos outside of that space that sits just under a mother’s heart?

Don’t get me wrong – the end result – the person born through this kind of genetic engineering is an unquantifiable good.  However the means used is what is in question.  As the old saying goes: the end does not justify the means.

In these cases of surrogate motherhood, IVF and the myriad of other reproductive technologies, I wonder whether we are not creating a mine-field of human pain and suffering.  Like, for instance, this father who tells a tragic and heart wrenching story of his wife’s choice to  “selectively reduce” her pregnancy after three embryos created through IVF implanted successfully in her womb.

My soul carries a new scar.  The pain is fresh and keen, and I know that while time might see the pain fade, I will never fully recover from what I’ve seen, and done.  For I have failed, intentionally and knowingly, in the first duty of a parent: protecting the lives of two of my children.

Knowledge is not always power. In these matters we have allowed science to usurp the natural processes of our human bodies, and in doing so, have ignored the ability of our fragile hearts to cope with the repercussions.   Too many choices, too many demands on ourselves and not enough ability to accept the way things are.

Somebody isn’t happy about the looming abortion debate in April.  Mercedes Allen, writing for rabble.ca makes a series of interesting but erroneous arguments concerning the abortion issue and when life begins.  I imagine it would be difficult to try to defend a position that holds that a child is not a human being “until it has proceeded in a living state from the body of its mother.”  But she does give it a good shake.

One of her more interesting positions is  that spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) somehow justifies abortion, because it means that the life was only potential.  In other words, because some embryos don’t make it past the one month mark, that seems to raise the question as to whether or not all life begins at conception.

But miscarriage is simply an anomaly of a natural (human) process.  It says nothing about “what it is to be human.”  We seem to lack the ability to know the “essence” of things and end up judging them according to accidental, irrelevant criteria.  Just because an embryo does not continue through all the phases of human life, does not in any way negate the fact that it was, for a brief time, human.  Similarly, if a toddler dies before reaching adolescence, this in no way negates the humanity of that child.

The crux of her argument rests on the fact that determining when human life begins is something that not even pro-lifers can say with certainty (huh?), so we must resign ourselves to calling early human life, “life potential.”

“The question then becomes whether people are or are not justified in making the decision as to whether that life potential does indeed become life.  Should every fertilized egg be made to develop into a human, or are we sometimes justified in stopping that process?”

First of all, the embryo is not a “life potential” but an actual life with lots of potential. All things stand in potency to some act. That potency does not negate their essence, their “what it is to be that thing.” The question “should every life be made to develop into a human?” is pure semantics.  Every life, that has a human father and a human mother, is human, and will follow a natural, predetermined course of development, unless it is interrupted, through natural impediments (miscarriage) or through a deliberate and purposeful killing (abortion).

The question, “are we sometimes justified in stopping that process?” is better put in these terms: when in doubt, do no harm.  The “do no harm” principle, (and this case, the harm is absolute [ie. death], which is why abortion is such a travesty) has always been the bulwark of civil society.  That is until medicine, corrupted by abortion, threw it out.  “Kill now and ask questions later” is the new “golden rule.”

But there is one thing we can all agree on. In Ms. Allen’s words,

“Like it or not, Canada, the debate has been reopened.”

I find it interesting that abortion providers are loath to admit that complications occur when they employ the various “procedures” used to dismember and destroy the child in the womb.  In fact, they have often been found to skew the numbers so as to make this operation seem as innocuous as going to the dentist.  Until, that is, a study comes out that proves that  “major complications during early surgical abortions are reduced by nearly a third in comparison with the placebo.”  Then the truth comes out.

The Lancet has published a study showing that Misoprostol administered before an abortion will likely cause some nasty side affects in the mother prior to her abortion (heavy bleeding, abdominal pain etc.), but that it will reduce serious damage like “incomplete abortion, cervical tear, pelvic inflammatory disease, uterine perforation, or other serious events” by a third.  Eek!

Remember that this is an elective procedure.  You can leave home without it.

In fact, I believe that women are a lot better off without it.

Read the article here.

I want to be just like Charmaine Yoest when I grow up.  This incredible mother of five and CEO of Americans United for Life is a force to be reckoned with. She breaks the stereotypes and proves to all those nay-sayers (the ones who think women have to disavow themselves of their femininity to get ahead in the “real world”) that you can do it all.

She is constantly in the news (at least the news that I pay attention to) and now she is behind Abby Johnston who is set to sue Planned Parenthood for fraudulent billing. Their press release states that:

Former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson, now Senior Policy Advisor at AUL, is suing under the Federal False Claims Act and Texas Medicaid Fraud Prevention Act that allows “whistleblowers” with inside information to expose fraudulent billing.

This should be interesting.

What does celebrating International Women’s Day (March 8th) look like from the perspective of Marie Stopes International?  Sign up for their e-newsletters and find out.

Today, they are celebrating Sofia (age 17) who

lives in a rural village in Tanzania. She’s determined to complete her education and find a job that serves her community. She’s seen the ambitions of girls her age broken because of unplanned pregnancies. And she doesn’t want that to happen to her.

Sophia knows that a Marie Stopes Tanzania outreach team visits her village regularly to provide contraception. So, when she is ready to have sex she’ll be able to make choices to plan for her future.

You can read more about Sophia and her friends here.

In other words, they are celebrating the fact that sweet, young Sophia is going to get put on drugs, not to treat a disease, but to fool her body into “thinking” it is already pregnant, so that when she begins to have promiscuous sex  (a likely scenario when you become sexually active at a young age) she won’t have THE most terrible of all things happen to her: PREGNANCY.

Does the Marie Stopes ‘outreach team’ warn these girls that 50% of all newly acquired HIV infections across the globe are occurring in women of reproductive age? Do they warn these girls that this is due to the powerful steriod-based drugs that alter their immunity and their cervical flora, making them more susceptible to infection?  Do they warn them that once they have contracted HIV, these contraceptives have a debilitating effect, in that they lead to a deadly progression of the disease? (Report from the 2009 Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS)

And what about young Sofia’s heart when she becomes bonded to the men she is having sex with?  What about the fact that none of these young people are being prepared for the long term commitment of a stable marriage?

Setting these young women on this course of broken hearts and dreams, not to mention the terrible risk of disease they will now face, is a crime against humanity.

Incidentally, the article mentions that the work of the “outreach team” is funded by USAID,

and is crucial in making sure that women in the village have choices: choices about whether to use contraception and – should they decide to – a choice of family planning methods.

Hmm…  I wonder what those “family planning methods” might be?

Here’s a group that doesn’t get a lot of recognition The National Campus Life Network (NCLN).  This bunch of dedicated, organized students have campus pro-life clubs at universities and colleges across Canada.  They receive the brunt of censorship and discrimination by their agenda-driven student unions, but despite the injustices routinely faced, they continue to hold events and displays, all in an effort to bring awareness to the plight of Canada’s unborn, and the needs of mothers in crisis.

Over the next week, six university campus clubs in BC will be holding simultaneous events on their campuses.  Their press release states:

Events include academic debates, resource distribution, information tables, and abortion imagery projects, all aimed at educating and engaging students in dialogue on the abortion issue. These clubs are also calling on their local politicians, asking them to bring the abortion debate to parliament.

Having staged such events on university campuses myself, I know how much courage it takes.  Kudos to NCLN in their efforts!

Here’s a new and innovative initiative:  Helping women with ultrasound imaging, free pregnancy testing, and a free cab ride to the nearest CPC right before they walk into the abortion clinic!  Apparently it’s having a huge impact.

Save the Storks is the brain child of David Pomerantz, 23, described as a “vegan hipster with emo hair.”  He’s also a practicing Christian and has worked with a team of people to develop a portable Save the Stork ultrasound clinic, that parks outside of abortion clinics.

I wonder if Save the Stork clinics would escape our infamous ‘Bubble-Zone Laws’ here in Canada?

Read more here.